Microsoft clarifies paid storage options for Skydrive

Microsoft has detailed the various paid storage options for its SkyDrive cloud service.

Here are some of the details of the new Skydrive.

7GB free for all new SkyDrive users. Microsoft believe 7GB provides enough space for over 99% of people to store their entire Office document library and share photos for several years, along with room for growth. To put things in perspective, 99.94% of SkyDrive customers today use 7GB or less – and 7GB is enough for over 20,000 Office documents or 7,000 photos.

Ability to upload large files – up to 2GB – and folders using SkyDrive for the Windows desktop or SkyDrive for OS X Lion.

Paid storage plans (+20GB, +50GB, +100GB) so that power users who need more storage can easily add more at competitive prices (US$10/year, US$25/year, US$50/year). Please note that paid-for storage requires the ability to pay by credit card (or via PayPal, in some markets) and a Windows Live ID that can be associated with that credit card or PayPal account.

Microsoft has also released a preview version of SkyDrive for Windows, a local version of its SkyDrive client. The preview is available for Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8 Consumer Preview.

With the SkyDrive app for Windows, everything put in a SkyDrive folder on a Windows PC is automatically kept in sync between PCs, Macs and SkyDrive.com.

Here’s a video about Skydrive from the site:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYQ2PjpUwlc

Microsoft updated the Windows 8 Development blog with more details about Skydrive.